Overseas Vietnamese student busted in credit card fraud ring case

Vuong Quoc Nha, an overseas student who recently returned from the U.S., is facing charges for running a stolen credit card ring using bank account information from the U.S. and U.K. to make personal purchases.

Ho Chi Minh City People's Court on June 28 held a hearing over the case of Vuong Quoc Nha, 25, who is facing charges of using the internet and digital devices to appropriate property and transferring and exploiting unauthorized information.

Standing in the dock with Nha were 20 of his accomplices.

According to the indictment, Nha went to study in the U.S. in 2011 where he joined an underground network of hackers. There he allegedly began to acquire technical equipment and instructions to break into e-commerce websites to steal credit card information from foreign customers.

At the end of that year, Nha returned to Vietnam to recruit several people to use stolen credit card numbers to make purchases in other countries and deliver them to Vietnam for him.

Among those who worked for him was Le Van Hao Hoa, an overseas student who illegally purchased 20 laptops (worth $800 to $900 each) and a 350-dollar mobile phone for Nha via an address in the U.S. The purchases were VND240 million ($10,750), for which Hoa was paid VND100 million.

Two other members of the gang applied the same technique to make VND100million worth of transactions. In total, they appropriated VND1.2billion from foreign bank accounts.

Another key accomplice was Nguyen Van Hoa, one of the main providers of hacked credit card information. Hoa graduated from a program at a top university in Vietnam, but went underground in 2009. He wrote software to penetrate e-commerce websites in the U.S. and U.K.

Hoa successfully stole information from 30,000 credit cards from 2010 to September 2013, and sold them to Nguyen Xuan Lam for prices ranging from $1 to $50 each. He allegedly pocketed VND1.8 billion from the scam, while Lam acted as a middle-man and resold the data to Nha and his accomplices for a higher price.